In most situations dry take-home ration programmes are
preferable. Current guidelines and the literature generally identify only two
types of situation where on-site feeding may be justified. These are where
insecurity prevents dry rations from being taken home safely, and where the
beneficiary population has no access to cooking facilities, e.g. recently
displaced.

However, in some situations other considerations may also
support a role for on-site feeding. The following are a checklist of factors
that may need to be considered:

· On-site feeding
may ensure greater net supplementation of the target group than a dry take-home
ration and may also conserve scarce agency food resources as a smaller ration is
allocated than in a dry take-home programme where ration design takes account of
sharing (these assumptions are highly controversial however, see Section 4.3)

· MoH guidelines advocate the
use of on-site feeding, or the beneficiary population has a recent
history/tradition of this type of programme so that the programme can be more
rapidly established than a dry take-home programme

· on-site feeding allows more
regular and intense contact between agency staff and beneficiaries, thereby
allowing better opportunities for community development initiatives and certain
types of health-care

· the infrastructure for on-site
feeding will already exist in emergency situations where large-scale therapeutic
feeding programmes have been established. Furthermore, where therapeutic feeding
facilities are being overwhelmed by demand, on-site SFP facilities provide a
better opportunity to monitor the severely malnourished closely than dry
take-home ration programmes

· on-site feeding programmes may
be perceived by agencies and host governments as providing a higher-profile
activity than a dry take-home programme for attracting donor resources and for
satisfying the public that effective action is being taken.

Where some of these factors are considered applicable so that
there may appear to be an argument for implementing an on-site feeding
programme, two further steps may be necessary before full programme
implementation.

These are:

· some form of rapid
appraisal whereby carers of potential beneficiaries are consulted about the
preferred programme design in order to determine whether their full
participation is likely or whether the opportunity cost of participating in an
on-site programme is too great

· implementing a two-tier system
of dry take-home rations and on-site feeding simultaneously thereby allowing
participants to select the most appropriate design for themselves. For purposes
of speed the dry ration take-home programme may be established first of all,
with on-site feeding introduced gradually. Once both types of programmes are in
operation advantages to both beneficiaries and implementing agency can
theoretically be maximised, although, in the event that one type of programme is
significantly more effective than another in rehabilitating mildly and
moderately malnourished individuals, beneficiaries could be encouraged, but not
coerced, to switch to the more effective type of programme
design.